p2kfuse - a FUSE filesystem for Motorola P2K mobile phones

This is a FUSE filesystem to make it possible to mount certain models of Motorola mobile phone under Linux. To use it you'll need to have FUSE, libusb and p2kmoto installed on your system. FUSE and libusb are probably available as part of your Linux distribution. p2kmoto is less common. It's part of moto4lin. You'll need the most recent version from SVN as it has some improvements over the released version.

For convenience I've packaged p2kmoto. The source RPM includes some patches.

• Source tarball p2kmoto-SVN-20080404.tar.gz
• Source RPM p2kmoto-0.1-0.20080404.7.fc8.src.rpm
• Library RPM p2kmoto-0.1-0.20080404.7.fc8.i386.rpm
• Development RPM p2kmoto-devel-0.1-0.20080404.7.fc8.i386.rpm

p2kfuse is also available from the same place:

• Source tarball p2kfuse-0.3.3.tar.gz
• Source RPM p2kfuse-0.3.3-1.fc8.src.rpm
• Binary RPM p2kfuse-0.3.3-1.fc8.i386.rpm

p2kfuse needs to have access to the mobile phone. You can manage this by running it as root, but that isn't a terribly good idea. There are a couple of other approaches:

• The p2kfuse binary can be made setuid root. It only runs as root for long enough to connect to the phone. Once it's done that it drops root privileges and runs as the user who invoked it.

• You can set up udev rules that alter the permissions on the devices associated with the mobile phone so that members of a certain group have access. The p2kfuse RPM includes a rules file that works for my Motorola V235. You'll need to add the necessary device ids if you have a different phone. You'll also need to add any users who are to have access to the phone to the group 'phone'.

Once p2kfuse is installed you can mount your phone as a filesystem with a command like:

   p2kfuse /mnt/phone

and unmount it with:

   fusermount -u /mnt/phone

There are a number of limitations to this program. Documentation on how to access files in Motorola mobile phones is hard to come by, so it isn't clear how many of these limitations are fundamental and how many are due to the p2kmoto library.

Here are some things to note:

• It doesn't seem to be possible to create empty files. Instead p2kfuse makes a file containing two null bytes.

• The list of files returned by the phone doesn't include directories, only files. The existence of directories has to be inferred from the paths of the files. This means that it isn't possible to know about empty directories on the phone. It is possible to create an empty directory, and because p2kfuse caches information about the filesystem layout it's possible to see such a directory so long as the phone remains mounted. However, before unmouting the filesystem you should create at least one file in the new directory otherwise you'll never see it again.

• For reasons that are unclear it isn't possible to create directories in some places in the filesystem, even though files can be created.

• I've made files that have the system attribute read only. I didn't want to break my phone by accidentally deleting important files.

• Filesystem statistics are returned for the individual volumes on the phone, not the filesystem as a whole. Thus the command df -k /mnt/phone doesn't return any useful information whereas df -k /mnt/phone/a does.

• Because it's only possible to have one file open at a time the contents of all open files are cached in memory.